Moscow - Simferopol, April 10 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Jewish organizations of Crimea appealed to their co-religionists in the Western world with a call to “spread the truth about the state of affairs on the peninsula and promote the lifting of international sanctions against Russia.” But Moscow Jews do not believe in the success of this hopeless cause.
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Leader of the Crimean community within the World Union of Progressive Judaism Anatoly Gendin in conversation with "NG" compared the situation in which the Jews of the peninsula found themselves with the restrictive measures taken by the Soviet government during the Brezhnev era. “We used the experience of the 1970s, when the Jews of the USSR appealed through the Jews of other countries to the governments of these countries so that we received the right to free travel to Israel. Then this appeal led to relaxations. And now we have decided to act again through Jewish communities, because in their composition in different countries there are people who occupy high positions and have achieved success in business. Through them we will ask for the lifting of sanctions.”
According to Gendin, the initiative was supported by the head of Crimea Sergei Aksenov and the president of the Federal Jewish National-Cultural Autonomy Vladimir Sternfeld, who has direct contacts with Jews in the United States and European countries.
True, the head of the public relations department of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR), Rabbi Boruch Gorin, does not share Gendin’s optimism. “The residents of Crimea have essentially become hostages, since their region is the part of Russia that has suffered the most from the sanctions. It turns out that people in Crimea were the main ones punished, and completely innocently. They are faced with a choice: either leave or stay but lead the life of outcasts. At the same time, Jewish organizations in the West have a clearly limited range of issues that they deal with, and the Crimean problem is unlikely to be included in it.”
Moreover, FEOR itself is not going to support the initiative of Crimean Jews. “We don’t engage in politics,” Gorin said. He does not believe in the high level of contacts of Crimean Jews in the West.